How to setup VNC on your Pine64 (Debian, SSH, headless)

[Luke]

Great post cheers

[eron93]

Hello guys, I'm new here in the forum!

I had some problems following this tutorial. I'm trying , for now, just to access my Pine64 through VNC!

I got my screen with a grey background and nothing happens...

Does anyone had the same issue?

[bonterra]

@eron93: that's a fairly common issue with vnc on Debian based OS and there are various solutions. You'll find several guides if you google it.

[apple4ever]

I had an issue where mate-settings-daemon would go crazy and use a ton of memory and CPU when I had it set as a background service. Based on some research, its related to errors, but I haven't found the error log it is using.

[MarkHaysHarris777]

I got my screen with a grey background and nothing happens...

Come by and visit us on the irc chat and one of us will help you get going...   

... its easier to trouble shoot stuff and help live than it is playing forum tag...

[wymand]

I wish this would show up on search engines. I have spent an enormous amount of time trying to get tightvncserver working. vnc4server worked first time. Thank you

[MarkHaysHarris777]

I wish this would show up on search engines.  I have spent an enormous amount of time trying to get tightvncserver working.  vnc4server worked first time.  Thank you

I am truly sorry... did not understand what you were trying to communicate (thought you meant the display of the PineA64 itself !)

Yes, tightvncserver has had issues for many months on debian , since the newer image releases came out. Many of us switched over to vnc4server at that time;  however, finding it those posts with a standard search may prove difficult ( I did not try it ) because of the way they may or may not have been pinned.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.  Shortly I plan to put a VNC | VNCserver post up on the forum that everyone can find easily.  In the mean time if you have further questions, please visit us on the irc chat, live.

[Unclean0ne]

STUFF

Thanks for this it's super useful as I've been looking for a solution to this for a while.

I am having a couple of issues, however.

When I connect to the VNC I'm only getting a grey desktop with a terminal window. Is there a way to get the full desktop?
I tried changing the permissions on xstartup as you suggested but it made no difference.

In attempting to get the service to run automatically:

I did everything as your guide stated but when I run sudo systemctl enable vncserver.service I get a "failed to execture operation: Bad message" error.
I've checked and re-checked the xstartup file for errors but it all looks correct to me. Any ideas?

[Skazochnik]

I think better use :
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
-terminal-emulator -geometry 80x20+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
mate-session &

[shoult]

Very useful. I'm a Linux noob, but a long time computer user (back to 78 with a 1802 CMOS Hex based computer). I was able to follow the instructions right along and trouble shoot a few instructions that weren't quite right for my system. In a couple places I had to include the explicit path to the file created in nano. But other than that it all worked fine and vncserver now cmes up as a service whenever I start/restart my Pine box. Thanks for the writeup.